Planning for Spring

Admittedly, I am very much a "seasons" person.  I love living in a place where the weather at various times of the year is so incredibly different.  We can get up to +40 degrees C in the summer and down to -40 degrees C in the winter.  Variety is the spice of life, right?

The interesting thing about the seasons is that when I am in one, I spend half my time wishing I was in another.  In the spring, I can't wait for summer when the garden veggies start growing; the taste of that first tomato, carrot or zucchini is pure heaven.  In the summer, I anticipate autumn when the apples are ripe, the hot weather abates and the air gets crisp.  In autumn, I look forward to winter when there are no more outdoor chores and the bees have started to hibernate so I don't have to feed them sugar syrup on a weekly basis.  And, now, in the middle of winter, all I want is for spring to come so I can get back outside in the yard to tend my flower gardens, koi fish pond and berry patches and plant our vegetable gardens.

As the weather continues to get colder - we are at -29 degrees C today (not counting the wind chill) - Ian and I manage our "winter fatigue" by planning for the coming spring.  This past weekend, we had a Garden Planning Meeting where we sifted through all of our left over seeds from previous years, planned out our spring and summer vegetable patches and placed an order with the Stokes Seed Company for some new seeds.

Ian hard at work at our Garden Planning Meeting.

This year, our garden theme is variety.  Some years we plant larger quantities of fewer types of veggies but this year we have planned for smaller quantities of a huge variety of different things.

In the raised beds that constitute our spring garden we will be growing carrots, peas, swiss chard, radishes, spinach, lettuce, onions, beets, turnips and beans.  In our summer garden we will be growing garlic, peppers (sweet and hot), broccoli, cauliflower, cucumbers, pumpkins, squash, watermelons, onions, zucchinis, eggplants, tomatoes, basil, kale, dill, cabbages and marigold flowers (a trick from my Grandpa to keep unwanted animals away).  We already had lots of seeds left over from last year but we did get to order some new things from Stokes.  For example: purple heritage tomatoes, beef master tomatoes (i.e. the biggest tomatoes you can imagine), yellow tomatoes and purple cauliflower.

We also considered crop rotation when planning out our veggie beds.  The principles of crop rotation say that each year you should change the place in the garden where you plant certain veggies according to the following scheme: potato family (e.g. tomatoes, eggplant) -> legume family (e.g. peas, beans) -> cabbage family (e.g. cauliflower, kale, broccoli, turnips, radishes) -> onion family (e.g. garlic).  This helps replenish the soil by making sure the same veggies aren't always depleting or adding the same nutrients to one particular section of the garden.

Our last garden was in 2011 and the plan looked like this:

 We didn't plant a summer garden in 2012 since we were travelling.  We arrived home from our trip to a garden full of waist high weeds, which doesn't really count as a garden.

Our 2013 garden plan looks like this:

There are few things that I enjoy more in life than the smell of the rototiller (it smells like childhood memories of my Grandpa and my Dad), walking bare foot through soft, freshly tilled garden soil and seeing the first new sprouts come up from seeds that we planted.  Ah...I can't wait for spring!